Restoring a TransNote from the Recovery CD's

Opportunity and a disability grant enabled me to buy a TransNote and use it for school. I had to supply the hard drive and OS. The hard drive is now a nice 32gb SSD (fast, but the HDD light stays on) and I found images apparently of the original three disc CD set you used to factory restore the system and recovery partition. They may or may not also reload the recovery partition.
Here's my problem. They don't seem to work.
I attach my IBM PCMCIA CD-ROM drive (can't use anything else due to driver issues) and insert disc 1. Run through prompts to do a full restore which formats the drive, installs Windows 2000 and runs several scripts. System reboots a few times and finally I'm dumped at a desktop with nice IBM OEM branding but that's it. No applications or support for the ThinkScribe is installed and none of the drivers are installed. This includes the CD drive I just did the recovery with. I have the OS and that's it.
Disc 2 contains recovery data as well but you can't boot it and there's no autorun, nor is it ever prompted to be inserted. Disc 3 is just an applications disc but I can't install any of them because the CD can't be seen under the TransNote currently.

There's only one version of the TransNote (and the internals are identical to the X21) that I am aware of so it can't be a hardware mismatch. I must be doing something wrong. Any ideas?

IT turns out the scripts used during the restore process are super sensitive. If the CD drive hiccups AT ALL it will start skipping steps in the recovery and you end up with missing or unconfigured files.
You have to follow the recovery word for word.

That being said, I finally managed to properly restore the system. From here on in it's like any other system. I made a guide on how the recovery should go.